Tuesday, July 23, 2013

The 2013 Farm Bill needs to be reconciled between the Senate
version and the House version.

Let’s think about this.
The Farm Bill incentivizes farmers to be unproductive in order to drive
up food prices. This was instituted
during the New Deal in the 1930’s.

Thirty years later the Foods Stamps program was passed into
law as part of President Johnson’s Great Society agenda. Presumably this was to help lower income
people afford the food that the federal price supports had made so costly.

Did anyone in Washington, DC ever notice that the goal of
capitalist, free market system is to create innovative methods of production
and distribution so as to make so as to make goods more affordable and accessible
to the masses? Occam’s Razor
demands that farm price supports be lifted so that an abundance of affordable food
can be provided to a hungry world.

I wonder who’s paying for all this anyway?

As a perplexed Ricky Riccardo might lament, “Lucy, you have
some ‘splainen to do”.

Sunday, July 21, 2013

This morning I discovered a huge
spider, the size of a half dollar, spinning an expansive web that extended from
the trees on one side of the street to the trees on the other. It was an awesomely ambitious undertaking, an
engineering marvel sure to ensnare more bugs than this spider could hope to eat
in his brief life.

In spite of the excellence and the
extravagance of the spider’s handiwork, the entire undertaking was doomed to
failure. I blithely drove right through the
web on my way to the park for my morning jog.
The spider did what came naturally him to the best of his abilities;
however, he had no way of understanding that his masterwork was built across a
well trafficked artery.

This futile web weaving brought to
mind Cory Booker and his new senatorial campaign commercial. A messianic Booker mingles with the Hoi Palloi painting fantastic thought
pictures and utopian visions. If elected
he will save Social Security and Medicare.
He will raise the minimum wage.

In a bizarre twist, the common folk with whom Cory is communing, smile
vacantly and then, when the candidate makes another promise, burst out in laughter
like so many demented Joe Bidens.

Medicare and Social Security have proven to be costly and unsustainable
failures. By increasing the minimum
wage, he will make it ever more difficult for the least skilled and least
qualified job seekers to gain valuable work experience and advance themselves.

Is Corey Booker really as dumb as unlucky spider? Does he really believe that these New Deal
and Great Society antiquities can continue to stand the tests of time and
reason? Does he really expect that
raising the price low productivity labor will propel unskilled workers into
middle class comfort?

Or, is he just spinning the usual web of charm and illusion that captures
unsuspecting voters year after year?

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Saturday, July 20, 2013

Former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton expressed far
more remorse about the Zimmerman verdict (“deep
painful heartache”) than she did in reflecting on the American who died
under her watch in Benghazi (“what difference
does it make?”).

So what’s the connection and what difference does it make?

Both the Trayvon tragedy and the Benghazi bungle demonstrate
one undeniable fact. That is that our
government is unable to protect us.
Citizen safety is the State’s single most sacred duty. For safety, we sacrifice countless tax
dollars and endure the erosion of precious liberty. In spite of this enormous price tag, our
elected, appointed and hired guardians have failed us. We are less safe than ever.

We are less safe because we live with an economy that is in
shambles. This arouses fear, uncertainty
and desperation. Even worse, we live in
times where income and livelihood are often separated from productivity. An overwhelming number of Americans have
learned to expect and depend upon government handouts, bailouts, subsidies, set
asides and transfer payments. These
government goodies are doled out via back room committee meetings and closed
door deals with lobbyists.

The people understand that we are playing Bastiat’s game of “legal
plunder” and they fear that they might be losing. This can only lead to mistrust, suspicion
and resentment.

When citizens see their public officials doling out
extravagant largesse via political chicanery they rightly become angry. So politicians of both the left and right try
to put a face on the villain and tell us that it is this group or that group
who is stealing from you. It’s Black
versus White, Anglo versus Hispanic, rich versus poor, man versus woman, gay versus
straight, workers versus investors and management, young versus old and so on
and so forth. And, as in the case of Trayvon
and George, this resentment and suspicion boils over into violence.

Don’t think for a moment that the politicos would not rather
have the people shooting at each other rather than at them. It just gives the State another reason to
tighten the screws and steal more of our freedom in the name of protecting us.

Likewise, Benghazi illustrates how our decades of foreign
interventionism, how the Permanent War has made America none the safer. Oceans of blood have been spilled throughout
the planet in pursuit of the Wilsonian vision of remaking the world in our
image.

Many historians assert that American intervention in World
War I did not make the world “safe for democracy”. Rather, it made Europe ripe for Fascism,
Nazism and Communism. This, in turn, led
to the four-decade long Cold War. As we
know, the Cold War turned America into the world’s cop with military bases,
intelligence gathering and covert operations throughout the world. Since the 1950s Washington, DC has striven to
impose its will in foreign capitals via bribery (foreign aid), subterfuge
(covert ops) or outright force (war and occupation). For decades, the denizens of foreign nations
have seen the U.S. topple popular governments, support corrupt and brutal
regimes and then invade and bomb their countries when all else fails.

Thus we again engender hostility and hatred. This interventionism generates the
predictable phenomenon of blowback,
whereby aggrieved peoples do what they can to settle scores with the U.S. Given that they cannot realistically confront
the world’s only superpower head on, they resort to terrorism. I’m not saying that it’s right but like Chris
Rock, I understand. In any case we are not safer.

Our activist government makes us poorer and less safe. It pits citizen against citizen and the world
against America. As an icon of activist government,
this is something that Hillary Clinton and her cohorts of both parties should
be truly remorseful about.

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Monday, July 15, 2013

Those who have made a commitment to spreading the gospel of
liberty, limited government and voluntarism face an uphill climb. This is because so many Americans, including
many in the liberty movement, myself included, are the beneficiaries of at least
one plum government program or another.

In their In their 1997 book, The Sovereign Individual, authors
James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg, identify three basic forms of
government. There are governments for:

1.Proprietors

2.Customers

3.Employees

Governments for Proprietors operate like businesses to
further the interests and incomes of a single individual, family or clan. This was the Middle Age model of Lords and
serfs. In the modern era these
governments are best exemplified by Middle East sheikdoms such as Saudi Arabia
or Kuwait.

Government for Customers is what we would like to think that
we have here in the United States. Our
founding document explicitly states that “Governments are instituted among Men”
to “secure these rights”. Those rights are
“Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”.

The way it was
supposed to work is that we, the customers, would remit a small bit of our
wealth to the common fund in order to purchase protection from foreign invaders
and from criminals at home. Then we
would be free to go about creating the private associations, businesses,
communities and institutions which so enrich our lives.

It hasn’t worked out that way. That is because we have morphed into a
Government for Employees.

A Government for Employees is one in which the inmates have
taken over the asylum. As Davidson and
Mogg state, “employee run organizations tend to favor any policy that increases
employment and oppose measures which reduce jobs”. Furthermore, “A government controlled by
its employees would seldom have incentives to either reduce the costs of
government or the price charged to their customers”.

You may ask, who are these employees and how are they so
numerous and powerful so as to displace taxpaying “customers” at the
polls. The answer is simple. The welfare / warfare state makes “employees"
of nearly everyone who receives some sort of check, stipend, grant or subsidy
from government.

Think of it. As of
June only 47% of Americans worked full time in private industry. About one-third receive food stamps. Beyond this however, consider all the
millions of people in “private” industry who work on government contracted
projects. Think of the academics,
researchers and artists who are supported via government grants. Think also of the billions of dollars in
government loans that inflate the cost of college or the billions in
agricultural price supports paid to farmers.
Ask yourself if your home mortgage is subsidized via tax deductions. And then there are Medicare, Medicaid and
Social Security. And don’t overlook the
sprawling lobbyist industry which infests each and every capital city in
pursuit of transfer payments to their clients.

It’s not so much that every American is a leach on the
public trust and an enthusiast for big government. It is just that the architects of the
mega-state have seen to it that everyone has skin in the game and everyone is
rightfully leery of giving his piece of the action unilaterally while he continues
to pay the freight for everyone else.

Louisiana political legend Russell Long was famous for
saying, “Don’t tax you, don’t tax me.
Tax that fellow behind the tree.”
He might as well have also said, “Don’t cut you, don’t cut me…..”

In The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan
Revolution Failed former Budget Director, David Stockman, tells how the
most ostensibly small government administration in our lifetime failed to reign
in the Federal Leviathan. Each and every
D.C. power broker had his or her own pet constituency that refused to yield a
dime. Each and every interest lobby warned
of dire consequences if this or such pet project should take a haircut. Thus, the Reagan Administration bequeathed a
legacy of unprecedented debt.

The
challenge for liberty advocates is convince this gaggle of “employees” that the
ice is growing ever thinner beneath them.
That it will be better for each of them to let go of their slice of the
pork before everything caves in and we drown.

President
Obama likes to talk of “shared sacrifice”.
By this he means ever more confiscatory taxation to feed the
governmental beast.

Let
liberty lovers also talk of the shared sacrifice. Let’s talk about what is needed to free
ourselves from the shackles the tax, borrow, spend and borrow some more,
statist ponzi scheme. We need to make
the case that our future lays not in being mindless employees but in regaining
our mojo as creators, innovators and miracle makers. We need to show voters that true prosperity
lies in creation and production and not in slicing the pie and the baloney ever
thinner.

And finally
we need to convince Americans that real growth requires savings, which means
sacrifice in the present for a future of sustainable progress. There is no magic bullet but there can be a
happy ending.

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Wednesday, July 10, 2013

I always score perfectly on the World’s Smallest Political
Quiz which always includes a question such as
“There should be no laws regarding
sex for consenting adults” as show in the picture.

Libertarians, and I among them, believe that our bodies are
our property and it our business and our responsibility as to what we do with
them. Therefore, we believe that
government has no right to tell us what we may ingest nor whom we may choose as
lovers nor what the terms of those relationships should be as long as they are
consensual.

Therefore, it is neither from prudishness nor bigotry that I
oppose same sex marriage “legalization”.
By petitioning the courts, voters or legislatures to legalize same sex
relationship, libertarians implicitly affirm the State has the authority to define
and regulate interpersonal relationships.
If that is true, our war is lost.

Government has only recently involved itself in
marriage. Throughout most of human
history, marriage was an affair that was handled between consenting adults and /
or contracting families. Proponents of “marriage privatization” like to point
out that George Washington was married without a license. But then again, so was everyone else.

American States began issuing marriage licenses in the 1800s
in order to regulate miscegenation, the then scandalous practice of interracial
sexual relations and, particularly, interracial marriage. At the same time the Federal government and
various states wer busy persecuting the Morman Church and its Biblical practice
of plural marriage.

America’s Founders envisioned that the individual states
would be “laboratories of democracy”.
However, they can also be laboratories of corruption and tyranny. Therefore, when other states saw that the
licensing states were making easy money in the marriage license business, they
soon got on the gravy train. By 1923 the Feds got in the act with the Uniform
Marriage and Marriage License Act of 1923.
Soon after, marriage licensing would be standard fare in all states.

By the 1950s the
marriage license took on new significance as a tool for apportioning the
goodies of America’s burgeoning welfare state. I a New York Times
Op-Ed piece Stephanie Coontz explains, “governments began relying on
marriage licenses for a new purpose: as a way of distributing resources to
dependents. The Social Security Act provided survivors’ benefits with proof of
marriage. Employers used marital status to determine whether they would provide
health insurance or pension benefits to employees’ dependents. Courts and hospitals
required a marriage license before granting couples the privilege of inheriting
from each other or receiving medical information.”

It is estimated that
there are over 1,400 laws on the books that grant rights, privileges and
immunities based upon a valid marriage license.
From a libertarian perspective the various benefits are programs that we
philosophically disagree with or could be handles via simple contracts.

The granting of health
insurance benefits to a spouse via proof of marriage is a classic example of
how bad government policy is cumulative.
In World War II the government imposed wage controls on employers. When the employers complained that they could
not compete for labor under such restrictions the government allowed employers
to offer health insurance as a fringe benefit which would be tax deductable for
the employer. Thus health insurance
became permanently entangled with employment.
And the benefits became entangled with marriage licenses.

With so much at stake by
having a valid marriage license, it is no wonder that same sex couple would
want to get their “fair share”.

For libertarians, who
want “government out of the bedroom”, they must is “legalizing”
gay marriage the best way to reduce the role of government in our lives? Or is the cause of liberty better served by ”privatizing”
marriage by restoring to the status that it enjoyed for almost all of human history? Are we concerned that extending the hand of
the State into same sex relationships will open up a Pandora’s Box of unforeseen
consequences which precipitates compensatory government interference?

Chances are that it
will.

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Sunday, July 7, 2013

The always cash
strapped New York mass transit system just dispatched workers to rip
out flowers at one of its commuter rail stations. This flora was planted, free of charge, by a
benevolent citizen in a random act of beautification.

The absurdity of
this first prompted me to post on Facebook that “We
like to think that a lot of today's liberals were Flower Children back in the
Sixties. Apparently not these guys.”

However, that snarky posting did not put the incident to rest
for me. It hit that this was a perfect
illustration of how statists see the world.
The statist truly believes that if the government did not do any given
thing, that thing cannot exist. Thus
random acts of kindness or beauty cannot be allowed to happen.

Thus the flowers had to go – even if the rail system has
trouble paying its works to do necessary jobs.

Thus it makes sense
that President Obama seeks to reduce tax deductions for charitable giving while
simultaneously adding more and more Americans to Food Stamps and disability
roles. Likewise, he makes it ever more
difficult for faith based institutions to continue serving the needy via the
HHS mandates.

Thus it is that both
President Obama and Elizabeth Warren could scold America’s entrepreneurs with straight
faces and total conviction that, “you
didn’t build” your own enterprises.
Government did it for you.

It is obvious that
for our overseers in Washington, in our statehouses and in our city halls,
nothing of value can exist that does not emanate from government. Our role is simply to pay the bills with
money that we did not earn.

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Saturday, July 6, 2013

On Sunday afternoons when I was I kid, my family used to
drive westward along the Admiral Wilson Boulevard through Camden to visit our
city cousins in Philly. Along the way we
would pass a shuttered storefront with the words “FREE HUEY” spray painted on
the boarded up door. I always wondered
what “Huey” was and imagined it to be some hip urban slang for sex. I oft wondered how I could get in on this free Huey myself.

Only later did I come to realize the word “free” in this
case was not an adjective but verb and that the message “FREE HUEY” was a
demand to release the jailed Black Panther leader, Huey Newton, from prison.

True story, I’m not that swift.

Therefore, if you are reading this article in the hope that
the word “free” in the title is an adjective, you will be as sorely
disappointed as I was back in Camden.
The objective of this essay is to heighten awareness as to how money can
be unchained from its bondage to the Federal Reserve.

A number of states are considering, and two have passed,
“Sound Money” acts that allow gold or silver to be used as legal currency for
the payment of debts. On a national
level a bill with the same purpose, S.768 -- Sound
Money Promotion Act, has been introduced in the U.S. Senate by Senators Lee
and Cruz.

But let’s get back to the state level. America’s Founding Fathers envisioned the
individual states to be laboratories of democracy where new ideas could be
introduced and tested. Those ideas that
were tested and proven beneficial could be adopted by sister states. As for clunker ideas, their damage would be
confined to only a small portion of the nation.

Sound Money legislation is an idea that protects Americans’
savings from the destructive polices of the Federal Reserve. It is a an idea whose time has come. It is grassroots movement that is bubbling up
through the states as the Founders envisioned.

Proponents of state level Sound Money bills cite Article 1
Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution as authorization for such legislation. The clause reads: “No State shall enter into any
Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin
Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a
Tender in Payment of Debts”.

Let’s take a step back and take a look at what money is and
where it comes from.

Money is a tool that enables people to engage in what
economists call “indirect exchange”. It
enables the plumber to perform services for the lawyer and then obtain bread
from the baker without ever providing any plumbing service to said baker.

Money arises spontaneously in human civilization. By moving from a barter economy to a money
economy, new avenues of production and commerce are instituted because sellers
of goods no longer need to find buyers who have goods that they desire to
obtain (e.g. your fish for my chair).

That is because real money is typically a commodity that
virtually everyone desires or at least accepts.
Thus the characteristics of true money are that:

a.It has intrinsic value / use / utility of its
own apart from just being a medium for exchange.

b.It is easily divisible so that small units can
easily be carried about or transported

c.It is precious so that even small units have
significant value

d.It is durable, so that it can be stored for long
periods without decay or corruption

Thus, over the centuries, precious metals have evolved to be
the medium of exchange between people, businesses and nations.

However, most people today believe that money is an
invention of government, that government creates it and gives it value by
decree. The money that we typically use today
is precisely that. Because it is created
by the whim of governments and their central banks is called “fiat money”.

Simply put, fiat money is an exchange medium whose commodity
value is nowhere near its legal face value.
Thus a $100 gold coin once contained $100 worth of gold. Conversely a $100 bill contains but a few
cents worth of paper and ink. Governments
legislate fiat money into existence so that they will never go broke nor ever
have to pay their citizens full value for the goods that they purchase from
them.

For the government and its big banker friends this is indeed
free (adjective) money. It is worthless
paper which they can exchange for valuable goods and services. If you or I tried this, it would be call counterfeiting.

In order to ensure that their fiat currencies were accepted
for “all debts public and private” governments instituted monopolies of the
creation of money. Then, through “legal
tender” laws they outlawed the use commodity money (gold and silver) as legal
currency.

Because the U.S. government can print as much fiat money as
suites it, the value of it declines as more becomes available. Thus the U.S> dollar has lost about 95% of
its purchasing power since the Federal Reserve, our central bank, began issuing
fiat money nearly a century. This
discourages the virtues of thrift, saving and prudence as money held will
devalue over time. In turn, average
consumers are pushed into either immediate consumption / over indulgence or
into risky investment to try to outpace the devaluation of their currency.

Thus these new Sound Money laws seek free money creation from the monopoly of centralized government
control. They will enable average
citizens to acquire, accumulate and exchange commodities (precious metals) with
a time honored history of holding value.

It is time to petition your state legislators to protect the
savings of their constituents by drafting and passing Sound Money legislation
in your state. This is also an
opportunity for each state to reassert its sovereignty apart from the
overreaching Federal Leviathan.

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